Strange Happenings at the 48 Hour Film Project

Motif recently sat down with the audience choice award winners from Providence’s 48 Hour Film Project and asked them one question: What was the strangest thing that happened during competition weekend? These were their responses.

Mark Allison

танец

For our film, we used a couple of friends of ours who are Russian. We thought it would be cool to have them speak some Russian in the film, maybe use some subtitles, thinking it would make our film stand out because of it. Now we decided on this before we got our genre and the other elements at the kickoff. We figured that we could write that into the story no matter what.

So we ended up getting sci-fi, made them crazy Russian scientists, and it couldn’t have worked out better. We wrote the story Friday, filmed on Saturday, and edited all day Sunday. We never came up with a title the whole weekend. We had Alien IV on the slate for the whole shoot. So it didn’t dawn on us till Sunday afternoon that we still needed a title. Well, at this point we were deep into editing, half asleep, and with only three of us left for the edit we had to think of something quick. We thought it would be cool to make it Russian. In the film, there are a couple instances when the Russian girls refer to making things/people dance, so we thought, “Perfect! Let’s look up the word dance in Russian on Google translate.” That came up as танец.

So we thought that looked awesome and made it the title. We raced to finish up odds and ends in the edit, and I headed over to the drop off just before the finish time, 7:30pm. We were so worried about making sure the film was all set, and our paperwork was complete that it didn’t dawn on me until I handed in the paperwork and the lovely lady at the table asked me what the name of our film was that I didn’t even know how to say it.

I thought for a moment, and said “Uhm…I don’t know.” She laughed, because she thought I was joking, and then realized that I wasn’t kidding. She looked at the envelope to read the title and said, “What does that say?”

“I honestly have no idea,” was my response. “It’s in Russian.”

She looked at me with a thousand yard stare for a moment and then said, “Ok then, you’re all set.”

So when I told one of the Russian girls from our film the next day, and asked her how to say it, she told me it’s pronounced, “Tan-yets.” Well now I know, but I felt pretty dumb handing in a film with a title I couldn’t pronounce.

Wro Stephens

Deviled Egg

I guess the funniest thing was that we were on the roof filming the Stalin/Satan scene and the security guard of the building (who was the coolest person ever) said that there are hawks nests out here and they can be very protective and attack. We were all laughing but also a bit nervous. We didn’t see any hawks but we heard a couple.

Mike Scafati

Baking Good

We had five dozen cupcakes — a key prop for our story. Over the course of a (hot) day our cupcakes were dropped, melted, stepped on, and man-handled, yet our kids, the stars of the film, kept asking if they could eat them. We said no.

Catch these audience favorites and the recently announced judge’s favorites at the 48 Hour Film Project Best Of screening on Saturday, August 9 from 7 to 10pm at Aurora Providence, 276 Westminster Street. Strange things are sure to happen!